Ethical and Critical AI-assisted Conversations in Writing Literature Reviews.

Writing literature reviews trains students in critical thinking and integrated problem-solving, competencies identified by UNESCO as sustainable development competencies. In the age of AI tools which tend to hallucinate, it is important to teach students to evaluate the AI tools’ output and write literature reviews critically. This paper examines students’ use of ChatGPT in writing literature review individually and remotely in a 3-hour zoom workshop. The workshop activities included teaching students strategies to write the literature review, interspersed with demonstrations on how to use ChatGPT critically, followed by students’ hands-on practice on a parallel task. The end-of-workshop online survey revealed that most students found ChatGPT more useful in writing outlines and summaries and less helpful in conducting literature search and synthesizing literature. The students were also generally positive about ChatGPT’s output in terms of accuracy, relevance, clarity, and completeness. Most of them mentioned they would continue using ChatGPT to support their writing, with increased knowledge about how to evaluate and revise ChatGPT’s output critically after the workshop.